


Prelude

by compos_dementis



Category: Perception (TV)
Genre: Cutting, F/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Schizophrenia, Self Confidence Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 08:17:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/937703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/compos_dementis/pseuds/compos_dementis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten short drabbles on Daniel's life living with a mental illness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prelude

x.

The summer before Daniel turns twenty-one, his mother passes away. The chemotherapy does nothing to save her, and Daniel does nothing to save her, and he is nothing but an arrogant twenty-year-old kid who believes he has all the answers.

ix.

Daniel is diagnosed at the tender-hearted age of twenty-two years old, and the words paranoid schizophrenia are scalded into his mind like a label that everyone can see. He can feel their eyes on him because they know; not because they can see what he sees, or hear what he hears, but because they see Daniel’s lips moving in the company of no one but himself.

Natalie is beautiful but he’s come to accept now that she is a figment of his own imagination. The others cannot feel the soft cascade of her blonde hair, nor can they hear the gentle puffs of her breath as she laughs. (He tells her dirty jokes, sometimes, just so he can hear her laugh again.) When his tongue is too thick for his mouth, and his voice can’t seem to find the words he’s searching for, it is because Natalie’s voice is still ringing in his ears, lovely and melodious as a song.

They give him medication to take, to help with the voices, but losing the voices means losing Natalie, and he can handle the staring if it means keeping her around.

And they look at him, and they know, not because they can feel her pale skin or see the twinkle in her bright blue eyes, but because they watch Daniel talk to the walls, and they mock him, and they judge.

Natalie is the most beautiful person he’s ever met, and she’s not even remotely real.

iix.

As the saying goes, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and Daniel’s father is no exception. The house this summer is nothing but slammed doors, silence, and the stench of tequila, and photographs flipped face-down. Of course I still love you, Daniel, he says, but Daniel feels a hot, sick shame burning in the pit of his stomach, in the hollows of his throat, like a brand scorched across his eyes (paranoid schizophrenia). 

And his father loves him, yes, and Daniel does not doubt for one moment that his love is true. It just proves to Daniel that not all forms of love are beautiful.

 

vii.

They tell him he will miss home, and he just thinks, miss what? He looks at the house he’s wasted twenty-four years of his young life in, and there is nothing left here but burnt bridges and regrets. 

So he gathers his things and sets himself free from his father’s loving shackles, and he thinks, this is it. He is euphoric and his conscience is clear, and he cannot help the smile that spreads across his face as Natalie’s hand tucks, carefully, into his own.

vi.

He is talking fast, and typing fast, and his hands are like bees or hummingbirds, sharp and precise. 

There are no tears this afternoon, no doctors rushing in to save him because he’s long learned that he cannot be saved, and there are no goodbyes and there is no anguish. 

He checks himself into a psychiatric hospital because it’s becoming clear to him that he cannot trust himself. Because not all of the voices in his head are Natalie, and not all of them are helpful. 

v.

The first time he puts a blade to his skin is when he’s in the hospital.

Nothing is satisfactory. Not all the voices are Natalie, not all of them are helpful, and so he cuts because they tell him to. He cuts and cuts until his skin is raw and bleeding, until he’s shaking and sobbing not for himself, but for the once-delicate limbs now littered with blood and scars. 

And when he tells them, “They made me do it," who can believe him but Natalie? No one. The nurses look at him with disappointed, dead eyes, and force pills down his throat, and he spends the next week in solitary, surrounded by white walls and away from sharp, harmful objects.

He is not allowed to leave the hospital until he takes an intern with him, because it’s clear he cannot trust himself, and he needs more than the voices for company.

iv.

Natalie remains, and foolishly, he wishes he could be her star-crossed lover, wishes he could bare a throne for her, crown her as a goddess and travel the stars. 

Kiss each of her fragile bones and whisper “Everything I do, I do for you," or at the very least, be able to hold her hand, to go out on a date, to listen to her laugh at something he said and not worry so much about other people staring.

"You have to move on," she tells him, kindly, and he just thinks, that’s so much easier said than done.

iii.

Kate is so much more tolerant and so much more enlightened than most people he’s met. He tells her about his diagnosis over coffee (herbal tea for him, as caffeine too easily triggers episodes), and he tells her that he grew up afraid of not knowing how to kiss, and how he thought that if he just met the right girl, he wouldn’t have to know how, because she would fix every broken part of him.

Kate laughs, says in litany, “You should be grateful for learning early that you can’t trust everyone.”

And Kate is understanding, does not judge him when he speaks to himself, and he wants to hold her hands in his own, because he is so broken, and she is so very, very beautiful.

ii.

People who are crazy, as Daniel is crazy, jump off of rooftops. This is what he always told himself in the past. They sell their houses on a whim, or screw six guys in the span of four days, or spend their entire wallet in one purchase. 

Daniel does not do these things, he comes to realize. He doesn’t even drink.

But the first time he has an episode at school, ranting and raving at someone that does not exist, Paul Haley tells everyone to give him room, and he says, ignorantly, “It must have been the caffeine, Daniel, you know how that can trigger you.”

Trigger, like stress and loud noises are gunpowder and detonators, coffee a bullet, and Daniel may not spend a hundred and fifty dollars in one go, but he is so much more shattered and splinter-boned that others give him credit for. 

And seeing Paul’s silent horror whenever Daniel begins to talk to the walls would be hilarious if it didn’t sting so damn much.

i.

Helping Daniel does not require an asterisk, and loving him is not a fetish. His flaws do not make him beautiful; they simply make him flawed.

And when Kate takes his hand the night he admits himself, again, into the hospital, Daniel feels so broken, so raw, so whittled down by the trauma of it all, that he cannot even bring himself to cry.

"My name is Dr. Daniel Pierce," he says, "I am a paranoid schizophrenic, and I need to be admitted."


End file.
